Shadow-Ops Red Mercury Hands-On

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We get a little more play time with Zombie's modern-day shooter.

By IGN Staff

While the Xbox version of Shadow Ops: Red Mercury has been out for a few months, we're still waiting for the PC version to hit store shelves -- but we won't have to wait for long. At a recent Atari event we had a chance to play a nearly final build of Shadow Ops: Red Mercury for the PC, and while it will still be a few months before the game is released, you can at least learn a bit more about the game from our hands-on impressions.

In case you're wondering about the name, Red Mercury is a semi-imaginary element that can deliver all of the destructive power of a nuclear weapon but without all of that troublesome fallout to worry about. We say it's semi-imaginary because while nobody we know has ever seen it in action, Red Mercury has come up in far too many espionage books and conspiracy theory writings for it to be merely a product of some mad scientist's imagination.

In Shadow Ops: Red Mercury, you're a soldier faced with task of tracking down and eliminating forces threatening to get their hands on some of this highly-volatile stuff. Your adventures will take you all around the world from Syria to central Africa to Chechnya and points in between. The game is organized with five distinct campaigns in the single player mode spread across 20 maps.

Shadow Ops is set against a contemporary real-world backdrop. You're limited to only a handful of weapons -- four at last count -- and you get a unique melee attack with each one. Grenade play is going to be quick and furious in Shadow Ops as well. You won't have to holster your weapon and switch to grenades in Red Mercury as there's a quick grenade button that instantly lowers your primary weapon, tosses a grenade and brings your rifle back up screen in one automatic sequence. This is a much more believable way of including grenades in your offensive assault. However, thrown grenades aren't always going to find their mark. Enemies will recognize and react to hot grenades by kicking them away, picking them up and throwing them back at you or even jumping on it to protect their buddies from harm. Seeing bad guys take one for the team is definitely fresh and exciting.

In the solo game you're going to be running with AI controlled teammates who will engage enemies on their own. The audio elements and voice acting that we've experienced so far in Shadow Ops is impressive. Your other soldiers call out for you when they're in trouble and help keep you on track progressing through a level when you don't know where to go. After playing a few missions, we were kind of surprised that the game isn't really that much easier than the Xbox version, even though you can be much more accurate with the mouse than with a thumbstick.

While the single-player side of the game will be pretty much the same as the Xbox version, the game will sport high-resolution textures, will support display modes up to 1600 x 1200 and will generally look better than its Xbox counterpart. The real differences in Shadow Ops: Red Mercury can be found in the multiplayer side of the game, where you can play deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture the flag and VIP (an escort game where one member of the defending team is only armed with a pistol and the attackers have to take him out) missions. Expect support for up to 32 players online, as well as twice as many maps -- about 30 -- in the PC version. Zombie has also increased the damage model a bit for PC multiplayer, which makes the game a bit more realistic than the Xbox version.

That gives you a little taste of what we experienced in our recent hands-on playtest, but expect more on Shadow Ops as we should be getting a build of the game before too long. Barring any major problems, you should be able to play Shadow Ops: Red Mercury soon as it should be out before the end of this year.